Favorite proposals for this user

We have two proposals on the list involving live-coding of music, http://opensourcebridge.org/proposals/1697, which uses ChucK, and http://opensourcebridge.org/proposals/1707, which involves Sonic Pi. Put the two of these together and we could have a laptop orchestra.

Favorite sessions for this user

Imagine a place where Ruby meets Music, its called MAGIC LAND.
Music is not a lot different from programming. In this talk we will see how.
I will talk about this amazing piece of open-source software called SonicPi. SonicPi is a new kind of musical instrument. Think about it, you write code to make music. And it gets even better, code is written in a ruby DSL. Also I will talk about notes, samples, synth and other musical things SonicPi lets us do it.
Don't worry if do not get these terms. When I started, I did not either. But at the end of the talk, you will know how to make music.

The era of "general-purpose programming languages" is nearing its end. The cost of building a programming language and integrating it with other languages has fallen significantly, but our approach to building programming languages has not changed substantially in decades. The consequence is an enormous financial cost paid, in terms of real dollars as well as in hours of programmer effort. The solution is not yet another "better" general-purpose language but rather a platform that prioritizes a collaborating assortment of specialized languages that together perform well in a specific context: an ensemble of programming languages.

If you're dying to stick it to the man, or just looking to make extra money on the side, this talk is for you. We'll explore ways you can leverage the most popular CMS on the planet to start or grow an online business.

Prototypes are problem-solving tools. They help your team pinpoint problems with your product more clearly and earlier in the design and development process.
Building your prototype in code has several advantages over wireframes, mockups, paper prototypes, or even InVison prototypes. They easily allow you to iterate through different solutions before you find what works.

The free/open source software movement is over thirty years old, and has gone through a number of changes in that time, spawning projects large and small (including OpenConferenceWare, which runs this site!). If Free Software is the first generation, and Open Source is the second, current efforts toward creating an inclusive and sustainable world make up a third generation that we can start to form into a broader plan.

If you're caught in a job or a project where you simply can't convince your colleagues or organization to treat you with respect, it often feels like you're in a maze with no clear way out. (Un)fortunately, you're not alone. There's no universal solution to navigating a toxic or abusive workplace, but there's power in finding a theoretical context, sharing our stories, and learning from each other. Come learn about the options of voice, loyalty, and exit, and hear the stories of others who have had to make hard choices.

Julia Nguyen leads if me, an app to share mental health experiences with loved ones. In doing so, she has explored her insecurities with mental illness, learned how to engage diverse contributors, and developed better software practices with Ruby on Rails and JavaScript. She’ll share the lessons she has learned from transforming a passion project into an open source project.
Inclusion takes on many forms in an open source project, including supporting contributors from all types of backgrounds, being empathetic to their project goals, and trusting them to take lead. As a mental health project, if me must also accommodate its contributors who face their own mental health challenges. All open source projects should do the same. Managing people is just as important as managing technical contributions in software.

I intend to introduce Neural Networks as a very simple concept. This can be achieved with Google's newest open-source library in Python called Tensorflow. I want to dispel the myth that Neural Networks are hard to understand and implement. I also want to introduce the current state of Neural Networks as they are continually changing the landscape of visual recognition and natural language processing.

Machine learning and especially convolutional neural networks are on the rise. With the sheer limitless amount of data and cheap computation power, neural networks can now solve problems which have been fairly complex in the past. Cole and Hannes will demonstrate how you implement a convolutional neural network with a few lines of Python code to classify images, recognize voices or understand texts.

Several years ago, there was an architectural paradigm shift toward "micro-services" and away from the "monolithic" application stack. A micro-service architecture comes with scalability and replaceability, among others, but is it worth the time and effort to build it? Is it worth debugging API calls gone wrong? If you're thinking about making this move, have already started, or have already deployed to production, this is an ideal venue to see what others are doing with micro-services.

Agent-based modeling is a technique used to explore both complexity and emergence by simulating individual actors and their actions inside of a system. Think of systems such as the traffic in the city or financial markets where one actor can have an effect on the decisions of others until the system’s direction changes its course. During this survey, you will gain an understanding of open source software available in a variety of languages and how to get started quickly.

Inspired by security and privacy research in operating systems, we'll be discussing possible ways to redesign privacy models so that all users can have fine-grained control over both visibility of their content and how others can interact with it.

It’s time for a new approach to software, one that embraces differences (not just tolerates them), and sees diversity as a strength. The industry is primed for change, and there are huge opportunities to do better by valuing emotion, intuition, compassion, purpose, empowerment, sustainability, and social justice. This highly-interactive session includes discussions of current “best practices” and emerging ideas from projects that have focused heavily on diversity, issues and problems in today’s environment, imagining how things could be different, and figuring out concrete steps to make it happen.

Open source (like many fields) rewards people who are confident and even a bit pushy. So we give talks encouraging folk to get over imposter syndrome, lean in, say yes to more things. But self-improvement shouldn't focus only on our most vulnerable members, but also our most powerful. So let's talk not about saying yes, but about hearing no. Learning to take no for an answer can transform efforts such as security, diversity and mentoring where we have few experts or volunteers and great need. Let's talk about accepting "defeat" with grace, and how to take "no" for an answer while still moving forwards.

Have you heard about type theory and always wanted to understand the principles behind it, but always thought it was too complicated since it has a lot of Lambda Calculus and algebras? This talk will approach these concepts in a friendly way.

We program today in a rich environment, but that wasn't always the case. We celebrate the pioneers of programming languages: Grace Hopper (COBOL), John Backus (FORTRAN), John McCarthy (LISP), Kenneth Iverson (APL) and Peter Naur (ALGOL). But there was a time before programming languages. How did people program back then? I'll show you!

What if your next hire could make your team faster, help create a more inclusive and diverse environment, be easy to find, and be super excited to work with you?
These people are not unicorns, they're junior developers. Most teams just don't know how to bring them on and get these benefits. Whether you're in a startup, consultancy, or a BigCo, with a few tips and processes, any team can learn how to grow new developers.

Favorite proposals for this user

Imagine a place where Ruby meets Music, its called MAGIC LAND.
Music is not a lot different from programming. In this talk we will see how.
I will talk about this amazing piece of open-source software called SonicPi. SonicPi is a new kind of musical instrument. Think about it, you write code to make music. And it gets even better, code is written in a ruby DSL. Also I will talk about notes, samples, synth and other musical things SonicPi lets us do it.
Don't worry if do not get these terms. When I started, I did not either. But at the end of the talk, you will know how to make music.

Trusted Analytics Platform (TAP) is an open source software, optimized for performance and security, that accelerates the creation of cloud-native applications driven by Big Data Analytics.
This talk uses TAP to detect anomalies in earthquake data and indicate any outliers on real time data.
http://trustedanalytics.github.io/

The team building community around a book called The Open Organization wanted to see how social media could enhance our efforts. We investigated and successfully used Twitter chats as a way to continue conversation and dialog around what it means to be an open leader. Now it's time to share what we've learned so you can do the same thing for your community.

The desktop application market has long languished. Even today there is no way to understand the strength of the GNU/Linux desktop application market. This talk will focus on creating a measurable desktop market by focusing on changing the application distribution model using GNOME xdg-app.

Devopracy is an open source project to build a disposable, portable cloud for civic engagement events and virtual democracies. We'll examine these use cases with consideration for security, maintainability, and code quality. There's a companion workshop on how to deploy the cloud and deploy an application onto it.

Apache CouchDB is a document database featuring an HTTP API, JSON documents, and peer-to-peer replication. Take a tour of the upcoming features and improvements in Apache CouchDB 2.0 including clustering capabilities for horizontal scalability and a declarative MongoDB-style ad hoc querying system. This talk should be of interest to you whether you're new to Apache CouchDB or an experienced Apache CouchDB developer.

An autonomous car is driving down a single-lane road carved out of a cliff. Unexpectedly, a child runs in front the car chasing a ball, and trips. The car cannot stop in time to avoid a fatal collision, but it can sacrifice itself and its passenger by driving off the cliff.
Should it? And if so, would you buy such a car?

As a major benchmark and trend-setter in machine learning and statistics, R, a free and open source statistical computing language, has much to offer to anyone interested in machine learning, statistics, or numerical computing. In this tutorial, I will share with the audience the vast ecosystem around R, and get the listeners started right away with some of the most widely used machine learning algorithms. You don't have to be a statistician or computer scientist to use R - its concise syntax and expressive nature will only make you want to use it more and more for machine learning and other computing tasks!

Despite all the attention and buzz, Machine learning(ML) is woefully overlooked in the community of free and open source technology. In this presentation, I will examine the still prevalent proprietary legacy of ML, introduce the current open source stack of ML development and applications, and evaluate new proprietary attempts entering ML. Then, I will share with you the strategy recipes that we may need, in a battle to keep the booming field of ML free and open source.

Non-centroid clustering increasingly is seeing need in data analytics as more complex models arise. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is one such solution to a clustering problem known as topic modeling. In this talk we discuss what topic modeling is, why conventional techniques don't yield useful results and how LDA solves this issue.

Iannis Xenakis passed away on February 4, 2001. When he arrived in Heaven, he sought out his mentor, Olivier Messiaen. Messiaen said, “Iannis, there’s someone here I want you to meet.” The two walked over to a small sidewalk cafe, and there sat Harry Partch. And so from this fanciful meeting in Heaven, “When Harry Met Iannis” was born. Now I'm not a carpenter like Partch was, and I don't have access to conductors or orchestras like Xenakis did, so I'll have to synthesize instruments and performers. The software that makes this possible is an open-source language called ChucK. I'll talk a bit about the Partch music theory, Xenakis' use of game theory and the ChucK language. But mostly, this talk is about the music and not the tools that made it. And you'll be the first to hear "When Harry Met Iannis 2016" in its entirety.

Open Source Bridge 2015

Favorite sessions for this user

You've probably heard about "robot jounalism" - computers writing finance and sports stories. Well, there's just one teensy little problem with robots writing finance and sports stories: investors and fantasy sports gamers don't want the data turned into text! They want their data raw, right and fast. They need clean, timely data to make objective decisions using tried-and-true statistical methodologies. So I'm not going to talk about robot journalism - I'm going to talk about fantasy sports: getting the data, analyzing it and using statistical decision-making tools to enhance the probability of winning.

When our code is slow, performance gains can often difficult to obtain. Our ideas of where to focus our attention are often wrong. pprof has become my go to tool, and it's easy to see why. Together we'll learn how to understand pprof's output to help us zero in on the parts of our code that need the most love.

Elegance is an aesthetic experience. It’s about perfectly conforming to a set of imperfect standards, meeting a need with no extraneous lines or rough edges. Elegance in code is the result of a mysterious process, just as elegance in nature is— in the case of nature, the process is evolution.

We have ethical responsibilities when coding. We're able to extract remarkably precise intuitions about an individual. But do we have a right to know what they didn't consent to share, even when they willingly shared the data that leads us there? How do we mitigate against unintended outcomes? In this talk, we'll learn how to build in systematic empathy, integrate practices for examining how our code might harm individuals, and net consequences that can be better for everyone.

As web developers we see a variety of tools evolve every year that all claim to be the future of web development, but few people are as excited to explore the past. In this talk we’ll trace the lineage of the contemporary web landscape back to the advent of the DOM and the first browser javascript API. In doing so we hope to illuminate an often overlooked historical perspective on web development and explain why frameworks like React and Angular came into existence and why today is an exciting time to be working with the browser.

Dogfooding—using your own products—is nice, but is it sufficient to produce good design for people who aren’t you? Our familiarity with our projects and their quirks makes us poor substitutes for users in the wild. So just who are these users, and how do you incorporate them into design and development?
In this workshop, we'll explore user experience design and research strategies that will help you design for people who aren’t you.

Let’s talk about the work we want to do, the work we have to do, and how we might create systems that don’t continue to force bad choices between building community, technical work, and diversity activism.

What happens when we tell stories? How do we tell stories about the technology we build, why do some stories get told over others? How do we talk about our successes, and how do we not talk about our failures? Whose stories get heard: how do women, people of color, disabled people, and “non-technical” workers get left out of the stories we hear? In this talk, I'll explore the role of storytelling in technology, and share what I've found about telling better stories.

I have explored weird corners of HTTP -- malformed requests that try to trick a site admin into clicking spam links in 404 logs, an API that responds to POST but not GET, and more. In this talk I'll walk you through those (using Python, netcat, and other tools you might have lying around the house).

When giving workshops or presenting online tutorials, it's frequently the case that the system setup can take longer than the actual learning exercises. Using Docker to provide a learning sandbox solves this problem while avoiding changing the learner's system in potentially destructive ways.

When Geocities shut down, it did much more than delete a bunch of obnoxious dancing baby GIFs and Limp Bizkit MIDI files. It deleted the ability for people to easily create web sites, and learn how to be in complete control of the content and presentation they provide to their audience. To the economically and socially disenfranchised, it was a disaster that prevented countless people from learning programming. So we brought it back, and open sourced the entire thing (including our financial data). Leave your nostalgia at the door - let us show you our efforts to pave a better future for tech startups, the tech community, and the future of the web itself.

Micropub is an emerging open API standard that is used to create posts on your own domain using third-party apps. Web apps and mobile apps can use Micropub to post notes, photos, bookmarks and many other kinds of posts to your own website, similar to using a Twitter client to post to your Twitter account.

People from marginalized communities struggle to break into tech, clawing our way through a racist, sexist, classist, ableist system only to be fired, quit or just suffer in misery. I’ll explore what it really takes to create a workplace that is truly welcoming of everyone.

Last year the Ascend Project was announced, then in the fall the first pilot took place in Portland. This year we'll report back on how it went, hear from participants, and break down what worked and what could be changed for future versions of this type of program. You'll definitely come away with some ideas for your next learning event, code school, or sponsored training.

Open source makes writing and publishing much easier both online and in print — provided you know what tools to use. This talk covers those tools (from LaTeX to WordPress) and how to choose between them.

If you've always wanted to play around with D3 or Julia, or both, this talk will get you up to speed very quickly. Using web performance data as the vehicle, and an aim to extract meaningful information from it, we will explore both Julia and D3 and come up with some fun visualizations that may not be possible using only one of these tools.

Search can be as simple as returning a word or part of word based on character similarity. LIKE and wildcard matches can be sufficient, but can only account for character or string matching, and fail on misspelled words or names. Phonetic algorithms can help us find matches for misspellings and typo'd user data.

Programmers gripe that we have two kinds of programming languages: the ones we write in for fun, and the ones we write in because we have to. We may enjoy coding that weekend project in Agda, but we have to leave that smile behind on Monday morning when we go back to Java or C++.
But is that really the case? Or can we find a way of bringing the expressiveness, the rigor, or the fun of our favorite languages into our day jobs?

Favorite proposals for this user

Almost every job involves a little writing, even if it's code comments or repair notes on a car. But what if you don't feel confident with writing? I have a rapid-fire presentation of writing tips and tricks that can help get you started, keep you going, and make your work better, even if you don't think you're a writer, I bet it will help!

Learn how to improve your agile development process through User Story Mapping, a technique that you can use to gather requirements easier, get everyone on the same page, and plan out what needs to be done while keeping the "big picture" in mind.

As a tool for human communication, the internet has successes and failures. It allows us to meet people, collaborate, strengthen communities, and learn new things. It also enables oppression, harassment, and noise. These problems aren't new, but choices made in constructing the internet have often served to blindly facilitate their spread. Instead of continuing to assume that the technical, social, and economic constraints that kept such problems from destroying past systems will continue to hold, let's break down what's different from then to now, and find a new set of solutions.

When you want to make a living from your app, open sourcing can be a difficult decision. What if... my future customers just find out they could rather use the software for free instead of paying us?
What if... a service company takes on my product and delivers a better service than we do, after all they have more customer experience than us?

Large news entities - like Gawker and Huffington Post - that cater to casual and regular consumers get some of their most popular news stories from places like Reddit, Twitter, and HackerNews. Their news stories are sourced by the user generated content of these sites - the commons if you will - they digest them, and then profit from the advertising income. This talk will look into how this consumer-newsgiant-consumer dynamic treats the communities that it benefits from, how the 'merit' of news stories' ranking on popularity competition sites like reddit relate to the meritocracy in tech, and how people react to suddenly being at the center of a media storm.

A common problem of working with large sets of data is that machine learning tools are not able to scale effectively. Apache Spark is a fast, cluster computing engine that provides a rich toolset for machine learning called MLlib, which solves this problem of scaling.

The range of options for music-making on GNU/Linux with free/libre/open tools stretches from music-focused programming languages like CSound and PureData to simple tools like Audacity, Ardour, Guitarix, Hydrogen, and Musescore which are accessible to novice members of the general public.
We'll explore the options for different sorts of musical creativity, focusing on the basic tools and how to get them set up effectively on GNU/Linux. In the session, we'll produce some brief compositions and recordings as we explore the software.

Take Bootstrap to the next level by learning how to setup a development environment with harp.js, setup a Less variable and mixin library, make your theme modular, and deploy your theme for use on your projects or for sale on a marketplace.

Data is often treated as an impartial representation of reality--an unbiased delivery mechanism for "ground truth". Data collection, however, is designed by people, whose knowledge and beliefs influence the design decisions they make. How does that impact what we think we know, and how can we adapt our processes to account for it?

“When we relate and share knowledge authentically, this places us in a state of grace, a state of 'win-win' harmony with all others, and establishes trust among all.”
“The bottom line is that our government is not intelligent about how it pursues the public interest, because its decisions are not informed decisions (and its interest is generally not the public's).”
“I realized in 1988 that my life as a spy specializing in secrets was not only unproductive, it was in sharp opposition to what we actually need: full access to true information, and consequently, the ability to create Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT).”

Ever wanted to build a simple kernel for a small computer? Curious how an OS starts and how it communicates with your keyboard and screen? Together, we'll build a simple arm kernel from scratch. No experience in assembly language or knowledge about CPU architecture is required, just some basic knowledge of C/C++ and curiosity about how things work under the hood.

What Are a Platform’s Components?
* Builders/Packagers that create a deployable artifact
* Artifact repositories to hold the deployable artifact
* Provisioners that spin-up new services
* Hosts that run a deployable artifact
* Routers/Load balancers to
* Direct traffic from the public to their nearest/most available application servers
* Load-balancers/reverse-proxies/service discovery to
* Route traffic from an application server to composing services
* Slowly ramp-up load as a new version of a service is deployed

Science writers targeting the small screen are faced with a number of challenges. To address them, I've developed a workflow centered on RMarkdown authoring tools and the Mozilla Webapplate web app deployment framework.

We talk a lot about minimum viable products, and building our products up from small features. We talk a lot about failure, and how to learn from it and not replicate failures over and over again. But what I haven’t heard a lot of discussion about is how we know we’ve succeeded. Is it market share? Usable product? Could understanding and setting a measurable, achievable goals help us overcome imposter syndrome, second sock syndrome, and feature creep?

You’ve been programming for a while now. You’re beginning to feel that you’ve got a handle on things but at the same time can’t escape the feeling that you’ve somehow plateaued in your growth as a software developer. In this talk Yitzchok, a rabbinic scholar and software developer, shares the “wisdom of the sages” as practical, actionable advice – strategies and tactics – that you can use to reinvigorate your growth as a software developer.

Lacking the Hermetic knowledge required to administrate servers, we take judicious notes and hyperlinks. Why not combine those written thoughts with the commands we enter to configure and tame our digital beasties? We have a tool for that.

JavaScript has a long history of being difficult to structure and maintain. To deal with this complexity a swath of frameworks have emerged over the years. At a glacial pace we have seen the web improve and those changes are ubiquitous now. ES6 and web components are happening! Come to this talk to learn how to get started with vanilla web platform code.

Almost everyone has a smartphone, and the majority can run Chrome or Safari.
Wouldn't it be great if we could use our mobile devices as tools to allow non-musicians in on the act of performing... by generating harmonious tones or presenting lyrics in time with musicians playing traditional instruments? What if we could synchronize multimedia events over dozens if not thousands of devices, simultaneously?
Well, we can! The technology exists today, in your pocket. The singalong.js suite enables these types of ad-hoc musical collaborations in various combinations, in real time, with no perceptible latency, and without the use of a click track or other such draconian control system. The best thing is, it’s licensed under the GPL and uses lots of open libraries to make it happen.

So you've had an idea, or noticed a gap that needs filling, or wondered why no one's talking about an issue you care about. Like the motivated and competent person you are, you start working, or writing, or talking. People start noticing you, listening to you, even asking for your opinion about their own projects--and one day, you realize they're treating you just like you treat your own role models. You find this unsettling. Surely motivation and competence aren't that special, you think. You, a leader? Can't be. And if you actually are a leader, what do you do now?

Javascript is a necessity for modern web development. Whether it is to add more interactivity to your user interface, or provide a client to interact with your API, chances are, even if you're trying to avoid working in javascript, you're working in javascript. Projects like Coffeescript and Opal, while useful, still do not help understand the javascript outputted by these compile-able languages. One growing concern in this realm is that an application's javascript can sometimes be a security concern, easily exploited by a malicious user. In order to catch these concerns, you must know what your javascript does, inside and out. This talk will illustrate concepts to make sure your client code is secure, while still giving your team the flexibility it needs to keep building your stellar app!

Good data visualization allows us to leverage the incredible pattern-recognition abilities of the human brain to answer questions we care about. But how do you make a good visualization? Here's a crash course.

Open source is only about open code, right? Wrong. Interviews, questionnaires, quick usability tests, and many other research types all have a place in the open source development process. With a few easy steps and a set of scripts to follow, your community can make user research an easy and essential component of your open source project.

Open Source suffers from a lack of diversity. Underrepresented populations, for systemic reasons, might never show up unless Open Source communities 'hack' themselves through explicit invitation & removing barriers to participation. Mozilla is funding two pilot studies designed to explicitly reach out to underrepresented groups in open source today. Seeking people who like to solve problems and then engaging them in a 6 week, full time accelerator program we hope to explore the question: Can we seed our communities by hacking the social/cultural/systemic issues in order to gain technical contributions from a more diverse set of minds and give to participants an experience in tech that might have long term benefits to them?

Amidst all the hand wringing surrounding the "future of journalism," developers, designers, and data geeks working in newsrooms are building projects and tools that engage readers and ripple across the web. We'll discuss ways this community welcomes, supports, and promotes new members and leaders.

This panel highlights the work of a few folks representing part of a broad, international movement consisting of network engineers, community change makers, researchers, architects, and thinkers who are building decentralized and autonomous communications infrastructure. We know that the Internet is deeply broken, and we are rebuilding, from the inside out. We mitigate the ills of interception and interference on the net by facilitating networks that are owned, operated, and governed by the people that use them.

Learn more about how to document your software projects with the most powerful open source documentation tool. You'll learn more about how to think about semantics in documentation, and how to use these tools to make great looking documentation.

It can be hard to focus on your love of coding when you are regularly battling invisible issues like insecurity, anxiety, and lack of confidence. This talk will identify invisible issues programmers struggle with, talk about their impact, discuss personal experiences dealing with them, and share some tools useful in fighting back.

Privacy enhancing technologies (PETs), like onion routing, PGP, and OTR often achieve a high level of security, but user experience (UX) built on top of the protocols is often a development afterthought. Without a concerted effort to examine how the system is used, people accidentally compromise their data or never attempt to use PETs.
This talk will show you PET design done right and wrong through the lens of standard UX evaluation techniques. Our goal is to enable you to incorporate UX principles into your hacking from day 0.

You use OAuth every time you log in to Facebook or Twitter, but what if you could use it from your own website? What if your own domain became a source of data, and you had your own personal API? By decentralizing authorization to your own domain instead of a silo, you control when, how, and to whom your data is shared.

Don't leave IP law to the lawyers!
Intellectual property law is a minefield wrapped in straightjacket sprinkled with arsenic-laced gumdrops. Invented for lawyers by lawyers, IP law makes many engineers resentful and dismissive. And yet most of us don't know enough about the details to protect ourselves and our own creations. This session will increase your understanding of how copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, and open source licensing protect you, your code, your company, and your community.

The tech industry has a 'diversity problem' and companies are courting women, people of color and other marginalized people as the pressure mounts to hire someone besides 24-year-old cis, straight white male programmers.
However, for many marginalized people, working in startups, agencies, and large tech companies can be a miserable, demoralizing experience that literally results in crying in the bathroom.
There's more to life than startups. Come hear ideas for making your own path in the tech industry, without compromising your dignity or your mental health.

Are you passionate about building tech, but think there is no place in your organization for junior developers? Come explore the true costs and benefits of hiring junior developers and see how you can improve your company while helping juniors become the best developers they can be.

Favorite proposals for this user

This will be an introduction to dependently typed programming, the Curry-Howard correspondence, and using your type system as a proof system for showing that your code is correct all done in the programming language Agda.

Are you intrigued by Machine Learning but don’t know how to actually use it? This talk will focus on a specific case, solving a large scale Entity Resolution (De-Duplication) problem with an open source Support Vector Machine (SVM).

In this session, I will brief the audience on the future of data storage in Linux -- what kinds of new hardware are on the horizon, the general direction of new filesystem and block device driver work, and new software to make it easier to recover lost data. Audience members are welcome to discuss these changes and to air their pain points with a Linux kernel developer.

Educators, authors, and co-workers are constantly demanding more code comments and documentation, yet none of them ever update it. The comments lie, the documentation exists in three variants, and still nobody knows how to make the code do the right thing.

QML (Qt Meta Language or Qt Modeling Language) is a JavaScript-based, declarative language for designing user interface–centric applications. QML elements can be augmented by standard JavaScript both inline and via included .js files.
I will be presenting why QML is gaining popularity over the purely Qt codebase,what is QML, how to get involved with it, and its future in the open source world.
A great advantage in porting the code to QML from Qt is that it reduces the code maintenance effort for the communities like KDE. The plasmoids written in QML will have considerably less code as QML allows the creation of fluid UIs in a powerful declarative way.

The conversation in today's media world is shifting away from "how much content can we publish, and how fast?" and toward "how can we provide in-depth engagement with single pieces of content." The emerging realm of digital storytelling means that "messages are not only heard and understood, but inspire, motivate and elicit action." Open source is adding fuel to this fire, and it is getting brighter.

Javascript Promises are a new design pattern in javascript that is easy to use and understand but also makes your code more powerful. Learn how to get started using this design pattern and how it will clean your code and make you seem smarter.

A parallel universe exists alongside text-based social media. Product ratings and customer-feedback surveys and organizational elections provide another path through which people communicate. Yet when we look at product ratings and survey results and election outcomes, do they always provide meaningful information? No. What tricks can we use to "outvote" other voters? Most importantly, how should your website or app or organization do the counting behind rating and ranking and voting? Alas, innovative DIY approaches easily give disastrous results. Only open-source software can produce trustworthy results. And only an understanding of counting methods can empower us to produce meaningful results.

Though SQL and NoSQL data models are usually very different, write-optimized databases offer some similar benefits for both. I'll describe some of the background and implementation of write-optimized data structures, and we'll discuss some strategies for choosing data models to get the best performance out of them.

The Experience API (xAPI) is a new JSON-based open standard for building learning systems and activities. It replaces SCORM with an API built around Statements. Anyone can read and write an xAPI Statement- it's English! You'll learn how to make your apps part of the new learning environment using xAPI, and how to map legacy learning systems to xAPI using Statements and other xAPI concepts.

Popular culture would have us believe that programming and art are polar opposites. In reality, code is just another medium with which we are creating art every day. Learn how embracing code as our art and artists as our community will help us create a more beautiful and accessible world.

Learning a new programming language and its constructs and conventions is difficult, but we make it even more difficult for ourselves. I'll give some techniques which circumvent the problem of learning something new.

An exploration of music composed and synthesized by open source software. This piece has been through three incarnations - 2001 (Perl and Sfront), 2004 (Lisp and MIDI) and 2009 - back to Perl and Sfront (https://soundcloud.com/znmeb/sets/when-harry-met-iannis-2009).
It's time to revisit 'When Harry Met Iannis' - better algorithms, more modern languages, and more complex instruments.

Writing operating systems sounds like it's only for wizards, but it turns out that operating systems are written by humans like you and me. I'm going to tell you what a kernel is and why you should care. Then we'll talk about a few concrete ways to get started with kernel hacking, ranging from the super-easy to the terrifyingly difficult.